Responding as a Thinking American, but doing it quickly.

For a man of my admittedly limited
intellect, it can be pretty hard to be a good thinking American and be
quick at the same time. I hope I get this all down right. As you may
or may not know, we are quite busy with our new business, and I’ve been
neglecting work on this site because of that, but necessarily so. This
is, essentially, an update on what’s been done recently and what’s in
the background for future work here.

First, I will try to answer some of the most
prevalent “non-public” questions that some of you have in common, then I
will point you to the links to pages that have been updated with
comments, commentary or dialogues, and then I will go back to work. I’m
a little surprised that so many questions have to do with Americanism or the American Ideal, rather than religion.

Anyhow, here goes:

Re Legal Immigration and the Minimum Wage Laws.

Elsewhere in this site I’ve talked about how to get
the illegal aliens who are here now to leave on their own, and I don’t
want to belabor that point here. And we’re all agreed that our borders
must be made more secure, just in the interest of national security;
although other reasons are important, they are less important. Americans have a right to national borders, just like every other nation on Earth.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with people
crossing our borders in either direction so long as they do so lawfully,
obeying the laws of both countries involved. Lots of people do that
every single day. Doing it legally means presenting, upon demand, the
appropriate immigration papers, passports, visas, green cards, worker’s
permits or whatever else is lawfully requested by appropriate border
authorities.

Is there a “Preferred” type of immigrant?

Personally, I think most Western nations, including
America, have it backwards. We seem to want mostly or only highly
educated and prosperous people to come here, to the exclusion of the
poor. Yet it is the poor who seek a better life for themselves and
their progeny, who are seeking something better, and who hope to be able
to proactively build a better life. Which pretty well describes
my grandparents, on my mother’s side, and my great grandparents, on my
father’s side, who came here poor, and who very proactively built a better life.

Adam Smith (Wealth of Nations) said that any man who
enjoys personal security and is free to do so will work to improve his
own condition. And that no one can improve his own condition without
improving his surroundings. This is the fundamental source of wealth creation. Without even his own knowledge or intent to do so, the proactive working man cooperates with the invisible hand of Capitalism and creates wealth.

The key thing is that they should really be immigrants,
who seek to come here to stay, and to become citizens. The illegal
aliens who are here now are, for the most part, here to make a buck and
then bug out; they have no interest in assimilating into the larger
American culture.

Why do I oppose the Minimum Wage?

Because it makes no economic sense. It’s a
nonsensical law that is violated every single day because it is so at
odds with economic reality. Millions of migrant workers prove my point
by working American fields and being paid “under the table” wages that
are lower than the minimum wage. Almost every week some “sweat shop” is
discovered and reported on in the news in American cities with bunches
of laborers paid sub-minimum wages. There is a giant existing market for sub minimum wage work in America. This is not rocket science. The market will be satisfied.

I think some of you have misunderstood me on this.
My problem with the illegal aliens is not that some of them are being
paid illegally, but that they are here illegally. And my problem
with their employers has nothing to do with how much or little they pay
these people, but that they employ people who are here illegally.

The overwhelming majority of American workers are
employed at a level considerably higher than the minimum wage and are in
no real danger of loosing any part of their pay. Any Americans who do
not want to work for less than minimum wage do not have to do so. It is
clear and obvious that a whole lot of people would have no problem at
all with working in America for sub-minimum wages. The whole notion of a
minimum wage induces in a population a sense of false security, in that
a certain wage is an entitlement that is just due, and does not
need to be earned. Big Government has a way of doing that, and
establishing itself as the mommy state, and a segment of the population
becomes mesmerized, and convinced that the Leviathan State exists to take care of us all.

But every time and in every way that the state
interferes with wages or prices or profits the economy suffers in some
way. Note that the very Lefty Dems who call for higher minimum wages
are the same ones who squeal when unemployment goes up, and who refer to
all profits as “obscene”. Grand social planners just can’t leave any
part of a free market alone and allow it to operate freely.

How can we eliminate taxes?

First of all, I never said we should, or even could, eliminate taxes; what I said was that we should eliminate income
taxes. In fact, what I would prefer, at the federal level, would be to
eliminate every form of tax save one: a national sales tax. No income
tax, no property tax, no corporate or other business tax, no form of tax
at all other than a sales tax, collected at the site and time of
purchase. If any other tax were allowed to remain alive, then this
would not work, because another sales tax would just join the existing
pantheon of taxes and we would merely have one more tax.

One immediate benefit would be that everyone who buys
anything retail would pay it, with no way out. Even illegal aliens and
other criminals would pay it. Every worker in America would get an
immediate huge raise in salary, and every employer in America would lose
a huge business expense. Last but not least, no one would need to file
a tax return ever again. Think about it: what business is it of the
Leviathan State how much money you make? Why should you have to go
through this humongous tax return red-tape rigmarole every year?

This would require somehow killing off Social
Security taxes. How to do that? Well, pick a date, and call it the SS
Date. When the SS Date arrives, everyone who is not yet retired stops
paying Social Security taxes, and no one else retires on Social
Security. Those already retired continue to collect their retirement.
Those not yet retired, as they attain retirement age, are paid the total
of what they paid into Social Security plus interest over all those
years. With that money, they can buy themselves a paid up annuity, if
they wish, and begin collecting their monthly payments.

That could potentially put us into a temporary
deficit situation, but, so what? A temporary deficit never hurt anyone,
including our first deficit under FDR, and it won’t hurt us either.
The important thing is that federal expenditures for Social Security
would finally hit a point where they would be increasingly in decline rather than perpetual increase, as the population ages, people die and there are no new retirees.

The inducement for American industry to expand would
be huge. The existence of a retail sales tax as the sole form of
taxation, meaning among other things no corporate taxation, would be a
major attraction to off shore corporations (which is to say, employers)
to relocate their operations to America. There are other places they
can operate without paying taxes, but there is no place anywhere near as
physically secure as America where they wouldn’t pay taxes.

As the federal government would go, eventually, so
would the individual states. The first state to abolish all state taxes
in favor of a simple state sales tax would set off an extreme
competition among states to attract and lure large corporations away
from each other. States that abolished state corporate taxes would
experience an economic boom, and states that didn’t, wouldn’t.

The Church and State in Art
page has been updated. A long time ago, my personal computer was too
limited in capacity to handle lots of graphics all at once. Now that I
have a super-duper computer, that’s no longer a problem. So I’ve
finally put all the pictures on one page, as I wish I could have done
from the beginning. Eventually I’m going to have to do something
similar to the Reference/Book Store page(s), but I don’t have time right
now. That page will need significant additions, because of planned
work (gun control, etc.) for which I have yet to enter my reference
books. I’m currently deciding which to do first – the books page, or
the gun control page. At the moment, work schedule being what it is, I
cannot do either.

A friend sent me some links to some, ahem, educational videos of the homosexual variety, and I have added them at the bottom of the Homo-Nazism
page. As I told some of you, look though you may, you will not find
any progressive tax recommendation among any of our national founding
documents or in the writings of our founders. Where you will find it is
in the Communist Manifesto. In a similar manner, the “need” for state
schools and/or state indoctrination of the people’s children does not
come out of anything in America. It, too, comes out of the Communist
Manifesto. Look at the videos and you will see how American “public”
school teachers have morphed into typical authoritarian government petty
bureaucrats. They do not teach from our ethos; they teach from the “ethos” of the increasingly unrepresentative atheistic Leviathan State.

I copied the last dialogues from SANE and wrote a brief eulogy for the NuVo Initiative at SANE Dropping Nuvo. Glad to see it go.

Sarcastic Acronym Hover-Link Footnotes: For the convenience of those readers using devices that lack a mouse, these footnotes are provided for all webpages, in case any webpage contains any hover-links. (If you don't have a mouse, you can't "hover" it over a link without clicking just to see the simple acronym interpretation. Click a footnote link to see the gory details.)

Changes pursuant to changing the website URL
and name from
Thinking Catholic Strategic
Center to
Catholic American Thinker.

Pulled the trigger on the 301 MOVE IT option
June 1, 2014. Working my way through all the webpages. .

Regards,

Vic

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secret complicity.” – Pope Felix III

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What you are in God's sight is what you are and nothing more”—Justice Clarence Thomas

"Blasphemy against the Holy Spirit, then, is the sin committed by the person who claims to have a 'right' to persist in evil-in any sin at all-and who thus rejects redemption." Pope Saint John Paul the GreatDOMINUM ET VIVIFICANTEM

"Not to oppose error is to approve it; and not to defend truth is to suppress it, and, indeed, to neglect to confound evil men-when we can do it-is no less a sin than to encourage them." Pope St. Felix III

If a purposeful violator of the Constitution who is a sworn officer of the governemt is not a domestic enemy of America and a traitor, then
there is no such thing, and the Constitution itself is without meaning,
and America has lost its grounding and its very purpose for being. Anti-American-Court

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Never be lukewarm.Life itself demands passion.He who is indifferent to God has already forfeited his soul.He who is indifferent to politics has already forfeited his liberty.In America, religion is not mere window dressing and citizenship is not a spectator sport.Do not allow our common destiny as a whole people to just happen without your input. Seek the Truth; find the Way; live the Life; please God, and live forever.

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"We belong to the Church militant; and She is militant because on earth the powers of darkness are ever restless to encompass Her destruction. Not only in the far-off centuries of the early Church, but down through the ages and in this our day, the enemies of God and Christian civilization make bold to attack the Creator’s supreme dominion and sacrosanct human rights.”--Pope Pius XII

"It is not lawful to take the things of others to give to the poor. It is a sin worthy of punishment, not an act deserving a reward, to give away what belongs to others."--St. Francis of Assisi

Truth is incontrovertible. Malice may attack it, ignorance
may deride it, but in the end, there it is.—Winston
Churchill

The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who
deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities.—Ayn Rand

Atheist Genesis:

In the beginning there was nothing, and nothing happened to nothing.
And then nothing accidentally exploded and created everything.
And then some bits of everything accidentally encountered other bits of everything and formed some new kinds of everything.
And then some bits of everything accidentally arranged themselves into self-replicating bits of everything.
And then some self-replicating bits of everything accidentally arranged themselves into dinosaurs.
See?

“ … for I have sworn upon
the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind
of man.” wrote Thomas Jefferson in a letter to Dr. Benjamin Rush in
the year of our Lord 1800. The context
involved resistance to any form of Christianity or Deism legally imposing
itself throughout the USA. We must wonder what he might say
about our current government's forced imposition of strict secularism – i.e.,
anti-theism – throughout the USA. I submit that legally enforced secularism of society, like theocracy, like Marxism,
and like Islam, is, precisely, a form of tyranny over the mind of man.Nothing good can come from the religious cleansing of Judaeo-Christian society. Government imposed secularism is just another form of theocracy.